The moment fragments of the story crossed into my aura, they turned to me. Their attention was immediate—some drawn by curiosity, others by something far more hostile. Peaceful wasn't the word I would use to describe the ones that refrained from open aggression. They simply weren't overtly leaking killing intent.

One figure emerged from the shifting mass of spectral entities—a knight, clad in obsidian armor, his presence suffocating, his form flickering at the edges as if he were not fully tethered to this plane. The air around him hummed with spectral energy, and when he raised his hands, a sword of wraithlike steel materialized in his grasp.

Power stirred within me, my shell responding instinctively. A perfect opportunity. I reached for the arsenal of abilities at my disposal, eager to test them.

I called upon [Sugared Maw], expecting pits to open beneath him. Instead, mouths—hundreds of them—manifested wherever my Starlight Forest extended its influence, blooming within the expanse of my aura. Voids of crystalline fangs yawned into existence, biting down in a 360-degree convergence. They snapped and shredded, chewing through the knight's illusory form with gluttonous fervor.

But it wasn't all an illusion.

I could taste him.

Copper. Ichor. Something foul, metallic, and ancient, like rusted blood mixed with divine rot. Revolting.

I scowled but didn't hesitate. My normal bow was absent, yet I no longer needed it. The thought alone willed it into being.

Liquid starlight coalesced in my hands, shaping itself into a bow that was beauty incarnate—a spectrum of purples, blues, yellows, and reds swirling into the form of a crescent moon, its edges gleaming with the soft glow of celestial bodies. It felt as though I held the entire night sky within my grasp.

And I knew, instinctively, that today was average. The bow's power would reflect that.

I pulled back the string, and an arrow formed—an extension of my mana, shimmering with light.

As I released, two more arrows manifested beside it, ghostly twins trailing in its wake—an effect of absorbing [Phantom Vector] into my shell.

The three twisted unpredictably, orbiting one another in a chaotic, erratic dance. They wove through the air like celestial bodies locked in an unresolvable gravitational ballet—the three-body problem in motion.

No one could predict their trajectory.

No one but me.

The first arrow struck precisely where the armor parted at the groin. A split-second later, the other two found their marks—burying themselves beneath the knight's arms, right in the vulnerable spaces beneath the pauldrons.

His scream tore through the space around us. It was louder than anything I had ever heard, a sound that reverberated deep into my bones. The sheer force of it sent ripples through the air, distorting my surroundings.

I prepared to unleash another ability, but Lumivis acted first.

He moved like liquid shadow, his form twisting unnaturally as he hung upside down, suspended by something unseen. His body coiled, shifting in ways that defied physics, and then he grabbed the knight—his fingers sinking into spectral armor as if it were nothing but silk.

With a single movement, Lumivis righted himself.

The knight did not.

Instead, he dangled, suspended by a rope of woven starlight, bound at the ankles, the wrists, the throat. The noose cinched tight, radiating with an unnatural luminescence, illuminating the contours of his struggling form.

Then, I felt it.

The ropes tightened.

Tighter.

Tighter.

The noose constricted, pressing into the joints of the knight's spectral facade, digging into whatever essence held him together. The pressure built—unyielding, merciless—until with a final, grotesque squelch, the knight burst.

Burnt paper and scorched ink rained down in his wake, his form unraveling into nothing but charred fragments of story.

Where he had once stood, only the remnants of his existence remained—torn pages, blackened edges, and the lingering echo of a legend that had just been silenced.

Approaching the silenced legend, we found the book it manifested from.

The Betrayal of Bath

My [Speed-Reading] soon came into play.

***

Sir Aldric knelt in the ruined chapel, his gauntleted hands clasped together, though no prayer escaped his lips. The once-proud house of God had been reduced to a husk, its stained-glass windows shattered, its altar a scorched ruin. Moonlight bled through the skeletal rafters, casting ghostly patterns across the knight's bloodstained armor.

His heart pounded like a war drum, not with fear, but with the bitter weight of vengeance.

"Duke Bath," he spat the name like a curse, "you will answer for what you've done."

Aldric had given everything to his liege—his sword, his loyalty, his very soul—only to be cast aside like a broken tool. The duke had betrayed him, branding him a traitor for uncovering the corruption at the heart of the duchy. His family, slaughtered. His honor, torn from him. The world had turned its back, and so, in turn, he had turned his back on the world.

A gust of unnatural wind swept through the ruined chapel, carrying with it the scent of decay and sulfur. The shadows thickened, curling like tendrils around the fallen knight. A voice, low and velvet-smooth, whispered from the void.

"I have heard your anguish, Oathbreaker."

Aldric did not flinch. He had expected this. Hoped for this.

"Then you know what I seek," he said, lifting his head. His eyes burned with the reflection of something not entirely his own.

The shadows congealed into a figure—tall, draped in flowing black, its face obscured beneath a hood darker than midnight. The scent of charred bone clung to its presence. The demon smiled, revealing teeth too sharp, too white, to belong to anything human.

"Revenge," it mused, stepping closer. "It is the sweetest of poisons."

Aldric rose to his feet. "I am prepared to pay whatever price you ask."

The demon's laughter slithered across the stone walls, twisting through the rafters like a serpent. "How eager you are to sell your soul," it purred. "But what you seek—true, absolute retribution—demands more than a single life."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Aldric's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"

"You have been wronged, yes. But vengeance is an infection. You wish to punish one man, yet his people feast at his table, his knights drink from his cups, his priests whisper prayers on his behalf." The demon's fingers traced idle patterns in the dust-covered altar. "Would you have them all suffer? Would you make his name a curse upon this land?"

Aldric hesitated only for a moment. Then, his grip tightened on the hilt of his sword. "Yes."

The demon grinned. "Then let us begin."

With a motion too swift for mortal eyes, it reached out and plunged a clawed hand into Aldric's chest. Agony unlike any he had ever known exploded through his body. He staggered, his vision swimming, his very blood screaming. The demon's fingers curled around something deep within him, something essential, something human.

And then, it ripped it away.

Aldric did not die.

He did not collapse, nor did he feel his soul depart. Instead, he rose. And when he did, he was changed.

The first thing he noticed was the silence. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of life. No heartbeat thrummed in his chest. His breath no longer fogged in the cold air. The flesh beneath his armor felt wrong—cold, stretched too tight, as though he were a puppet draped in his own skin.

The demon stepped back, admiring its work.

"You are no longer bound by the feeble chains of mortality," it murmured. "And neither shall the land that betrayed you."

Aldric turned toward the chapel doors. He could feel it now—the pulse of the earth itself, sluggish, waiting. The bones beneath the soil. The spirits lingering in the ruins.

He lifted a hand, and the ground trembled in response.

Far beyond the chapel, in the heart of Duke Bath's city, the first corpse stirred. A grave cracked open. Fingers, rotted and broken, clawed their way toward the sky.

The necropolis had begun.

Three days later, the duchy of Bath lay in ruin.

The streets were rivers of death, choked with shambling figures who no longer remembered their names, their lives, their loves. The bells in the cathedral tolled a funeral dirge, though no living hands rang them. The air was thick with the wail of the dying and the laughter of the damned.

Duke Bath himself had barricaded the gates of his fortress, his once-loyal knights standing guard in trembling silence. They had heard the stories. The dead did not rest. They did not stop.

And at their head stood a figure in blackened armor, a sword wreathed in pale, unholy flame.

Aldric.

Or what had been Aldric.

He rode alone through the ruined city, the undead parting before him like water before a prow.

At last, he reached the fortress. The gates groaned beneath the weight of makeshift barricades. He raised his hand, and from the shadows of the dead, chains erupted—latching onto the iron gates, tearing them apart with the strength of a hundred decayed hands.

Beyond them, Duke Bath stood, his once-proud form now trembling.

"Aldric," he gasped.

The knight stepped forward, his voice a whisper of ruin.

"No," he said. "Not anymore."

The gates of hell had opened.

And Bath would burn.

Aldric no longer felt hunger. No longer felt fatigue. No longer felt time.

As he stood before the broken gates of Bath's fortress, watching Duke Bath stumble backward in wide-eyed terror, he realized something else—he no longer felt rage. Once, the fire of vengeance had been all-consuming, a forge within his chest that had burned away his fear, his doubt, his hesitation.

Now, there was only the cold certainty of rot.

He stepped forward, and with him came the stench of ruin. His armor, once gleaming silver and blue, was now tarnished black, stained with the seepage of corpses and rusted with something darker than mere decay. Tendrils of shadow curled around his feet, writhing like worms in fresh carrion. His tabard, once bearing the sigil of his knighthood, had rotted into tatters, hanging from his shoulders like the burial shroud of a forgotten king.

The weight of his sword in his gauntleted hand was different now—not just steel, but something wrong, something alive in a way that no blade should be. When he had reforged it in the blood of the fallen, it had taken on a life of its own, a gleaming mass of black metal veined with glowing green, pulsing as if it had a heartbeat. When he moved, the weapon sang—not with the clash of steel, but with a whispering chorus of the damned.

Aldric raised it now, leveling the edge toward the man who had betrayed him.

Duke Bath had always been a proud man, a ruler who held himself above the common folk, above his knights, above the very laws he was sworn to uphold. Yet now, he was reduced to something pathetic—a wretched creature draped in silks, trembling before the abyss.

"You are no man," the Duke gasped. "What are you?"

Aldric tilted his head, considering the question.

Once, he had been a knight. Once, he had fought for honor, for duty, for the ideals that had been carved into him from childhood. Now, he was something else. A plague. A harbinger.

A blight upon the living.

"I am the last breath before the grave," Aldric said, his voice hollow, reverberating with the echoes of countless voices. "I am the rot that seeps beneath your skin. I am the hunger that no feast can sate."

He took another step, and the air thickened with sickness. The walls of the fortress wept black ichor, veins of pulsing decay spreading across the stone. The knights standing beside Duke Bath faltered, clutching at their throats as their lungs filled with stagnant air, their skin paling to sickly gray.

"You called me Aldric once," he said, his voice colder than the grave. "That name belongs to a man who died upon your orders. Now, I am Blightfang."

With that name spoken, the fortress withered.

The torches along the walls flickered and died, their flames strangled by the creeping fog that slithered in through the cracks. The banners bearing Bath's sigil curled and blackened as rot consumed the fabric. The fortress had stood for centuries, its stone walls a monument to the Duke's power—now, it was nothing but a mausoleum waiting to be filled.

The knights still standing drew their weapons, though their hands trembled. They were men of war, seasoned in battle, but what they faced was not a man. Blightfang did not advance in a warrior's stance, did not meet them in honorable combat.

He simply exhaled.

A thick, putrid mist rolled from his body, curling like a living thing toward the soldiers. The moment it touched them, their flesh blistered, their eyes turned milky, and their armor corroded as though centuries of rust had claimed it in an instant.

The first knight screamed as his skin sloughed from his bones. The second coughed once, then fell, his body already hollow. The third simply stopped, his eyes staring at nothing as he joined the ranks of the newly risen.

Duke Bath turned to run.

Blightfang laughed—a low, dry rasp, like wind through a field of graves.

The fortress doors slammed shut behind the Duke, twisted vines of necrotic sinew sealing them. The Duke stumbled, falling to his knees as the creeping rot began to seep up the walls, filling the air with the scent of something ancient, something dead.

Blightfang reached for him, not with his sword, but with something worse.

A hand.

The Duke recoiled, but it was too late. Blightfang's fingers curled around his throat, and where they touched, life fled. Duke Bath's skin blackened, veins rising in twisted patterns as the corruption spread through his body. His breath hitched. His pupils expanded until his eyes were nothing but pits of darkness.

The Duke of Bath—once a ruler of men, a master of politics, a betrayer—let out a single, choked sound before his body convulsed. The light in his eyes dimmed.

But he did not die.

Blightfang would not allow it.

The Duke's lips parted, a ragged breath escaping, but it was not his own. His chest rose and fell, but there was no heartbeat.

His body still lived.

His soul, however, belonged to the Blight Knight.

Blightfang released him, and the Duke stood, eyes vacant, a puppet held by unseen strings.

The last living man in Bath had fallen.

The duchy had become a kingdom of the dead.

And at its throne stood Blightfang, the Knight of Decay, the Blight upon the Living, the Betrayer's Bane.

His vengeance was complete.

But he was not yet finished.

There were still other lands that deserved to rot.

***

"Did this truly happen?"

"Probably. It's a tale known to the eldest, and seen time and time again to the youngest. The flame of vengeance burns like a poison, and it's delivered via a spoonful of honey to those who were given the disease known as betrayal. Both cause a festering wound, a cancer, and it will spread if left unchecked." Lumivis' voice sounded so distant, yet at the same time I knew he was right there.

Looking at the book, I left it, but next to it I found one that gave me a cold wrenching chill.

The Paper Walker.

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